The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

A Novel

About the Book

Fourteen-year-old Jamie will never forget the summer of 1976. It's the summer when she has her first boyfriend, cute surfer Flip Jenkins; it's the summer when her two best friends get serious about sex, cigarettes, and tanning; it's the summer when her parents throw, yes, naked swim parties, leaving Jamie flushed with embarrassment. And it's the summer that forever changes the way Jamie sees the things that matter: family, friendship, love, and herself.

“Jessica Anya Blau’s debut novel, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES, is a delight: a California beach girl’s hilariously painful adolescence in the High 1970s.” — John Barth

“You may think you’ve heard this story before, but no one tells it as wittily, winningly, wisely and well as Jessica Anya Blau.” — Madison Smartt Bell

“This book will make you laugh and cry in public. Jessica Anya Blau has written a soaring teenage lament, perfectly pitched, containing the single saddest and funniest line of seduction ever uttered.” — Larry Doyle, author of I Love You, Beth Cooper

“Funny and charming, moving and sweet—Jessica Anya Blau beautifully captures the awkwardness and the wonder of coming of age. The Summer of Naked Swim Parties is a remarkable debut novel.” — Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody

“Once you dive in to this sweet, sparkling coming of age story, dripping with heart and heartbreak, you won’t want to come up -- even for air.” — Hillary Carlip, author of Queen of the Oddballs: And Other True Stories from a Life Unaccording to Plan

“Among the many truths in this intelligent, funny novel about family, sex, and coming of age in the 1970s is this: no one can embarrass us more than our parents.” — Geoffrey Becker, author of author of Dangerous Men and Bluestown

“Having grown up in 1970s Southern California, I can personally attest to this novel’s utterly uncanny evocation of the era. It’s also really really fucking funny…” — Jonathan Selwood, author of The Pinball Theory of Apocalypse

“Jessica Anya Blau is a warm and funny storyteller. THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES conjures the thrills and anxieties of a 1970s California adolescence in a world awash in sex.” — Gabriel Brownstein, author of The Man from Beyond

“Ms. Blau is a writer of wit, intelligence, deep feeling, humor and imagination, and she gets into the head of a young person like almost nobody since J.D. Salinger. All aboard!” — Stephen Dixon

“Jessica Anya Blau creates a charming protagonist, her charismatic Santa Barbara family and a summer of love, lust and confusion. You won’t want summer - and this wonderful book - to end.” — Ellen Sussman, author of Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex; Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave; and On a Night Like This

“Recovered Judy Blume addicts, brace yourselves for a relapse: Jessica Anya Blau’s debut novel, set in Santa Barbara, California, during the summer of ’76, is a poignant, gleeful ode to the turbulence of growing up . . . [A] dead-on portrayal of the simple yet shocking revelations of youth.” — Time Out New York

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